For my Opteron 170 @ 2.2 ghz using 124W from the wall I can only calculate the current project PPDPW at this time,

2651 - 6.8ppdpw

I'm not sure if I'll be able to measure the draw from my friends Q6600 that he has folding for me, or the Dual Opteron machine I have in the lab. Hopefully I'll upgrade to an efficient AMD quad within a years time. I'll post some numbers for other WU's as soon as I can.

For my Opteron 170 @ 2.2 ghz using 124W from the wall I can only calculate the current project PPDPW at this time,

2651 - 6.8ppdpw

I'm not sure if I'll be able to measure the draw from my friends Q6600 that he has folding for me, or the Dual Opteron machine I have in the lab. Hopefully I'll upgrade to an efficient AMD quad within a years time. I'll post some numbers for other WU's as soon as I can.

After I purchased a Brisbane I asked myself why didn't I buy an Opteron, but them I saw the power use and decided I'm glad I didn't.

_________________People who put money and political ideology ahead of truth and ethics are neither﻿ patriots nor human beings.

The Mac mini was a refurb direct from Apple $699. Was suposed to have 512 MB RAM, came with 2 GB. Nice, but the Gromacs-SMP does not use the extra RAM. I run it headless and keyboardless 24/7 since March, just plug it in for updates and password entry. Monitored via ssh and qd-tools from other computers. Cpu temp ~150 F with air temp ~ 80 F.

The iMac 20" was purchased at a local Apple retailer for $1,649 with 2 GB RAM installed by Apple, not the retailer. 24/7 since 12/22/06. Its cpu runs about 162 F. The next generation of iMac will be quicker.

Hmmm, this thread makes me want to try to get my gf's iMac to start folding for us. I'll see if I can make that happen when I visit her place in a couple of weeks (yeah, long-distance relationships suck).

The OC'd Q6600 looks like a real flame thrower. May I ask what motherboard and PSU you use? I'm leaning towards an ASUS P5B Deluxe and a Seasonic S12 550.

When ordering a Q6600 or a Xeon 3220, how do you know that you'll get the G0 and not the B3 step spec cpu? I've been looking at Newegg and NCIXUS and there's no word about chip spec anywhere.

I purchased a Gigabyte P35-DS3R and used an older Corsair HX620w (overkill). The chip was purchased from NCIXUS when I first heard reports of G0 steppings being shipped. I lucked out and got a G0 instead of a B3.

......It can average over 1,000PPD (with those 1760 pointers) and it maxes out at 63watts (a lot of which is the screen backlight, which is not needed for Folding, but even counting that) it is 15.87PPWPD!

I'm having a mental block here, what's the formula being used here? At 63 watts a total of 1.512 KWH is used per day to earn 1000 points. Then what?

Oh wait, 1000/1512 * 24 = 15.87 OK.

_________________People who put money and political ideology ahead of truth and ethics are neither﻿ patriots nor human beings.

I am glad you started this thread. With the advent of the computers and environment forum, I was wondering if the SPCR folding folks were looking at environmental impact of the project. (Just a little looking on the folding boards suggests they haven't considered it much.)

Some back of the envelope calculations based on the figures here -
If we assumed that 10 PPDPW was typical (probably overestimating efficiency - especially for older Folds).
Then the 64.5 million Points produced so far by the SPCR team (at the time of this writing) translate to 6.45MW-days (64.5M points/10PPDPW)

Team SPCRs contribution comes to something like $23,000
and about 100 Metric tons of CO2

A rough eyeball of the overall Folding statistics
suggests that overall total is currently about 6 billion points

(I didn't find where in the statistics they summarize total points - but I probably just didn't look in the right place).

Figuring that as about 100 times the
SPCR teams contribution - the total comes to
about 15GW-Hours, $2million, and 10,000 Metric tons CO2
(to say nothing of energy cost for communications, their servers, etc.)

Seems like the folding stats sites should also point out the financial and environmental impact of this affair.
(I am not saying it isn't worth while, but it should be more clearly addressed. They even try to disguise their electricity cost estimate of $130/year by breaking it down to a daily figure.

I can think of plenty of things with surer payofs for humanity than Folding to donate $130/year to.)

I am concerned about the environment, and am trying to do things in a more sustainable way, but I am not "OMG the sky is falling, global warming". There have always been big overhyped catastrophies, and if they were true, we should not be here. In the late 60's and early 70's, I remember that we should be out of oil by now, out of gas, and the whole country should have been buried in garbage 20 feet deep by now.

The planet warms up and cools down, and we might well be in a naturally occuring warming cycle. It is not clear how much of that can be attributed to humans. I believe that some small amount can, and we can do better, but we do not need to get too extreme. I see that even you turned on an evil power wasting device to be able to browse this thread and post a reply.

I am a computer engineer, have enjoyed computers most of my life, and am always doing something at home with computers. I have several in the house, and have several that run 24/7.

As long as I am going to have computers running 24/7 anyway, I thought that it would be good to donate some of my wasted CPU cycles to folding. Certainly folding is not the absolute optimal use of time or money to attack cancer, but it is a little bit that I can do and enjoy. And at least realistically for me, if I turned off folding, I would not then make the effort to research that optimal use of that time and money for charity, and instead, I would just pay a slightly lower electricity bill, and that would be the end of it.

Tuning my computers, and seeing the results of the point output, and a little friendly competition amongs the other folders is enjoyable. Certainly I could go hide in a cold dark cave for a hobby and do less impact to the environment, but I do not find that particularly appealing, and I think that as far as hobbies go, running a little extra power through my computers keeping them busy instead of idle is a pretty insignificant impact on the environment.

Last edited by VanWaGuy on Fri Oct 12, 2007 12:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In the late 60's and early 70's, I remember that we should be out of oil by now, out of gas,

you are of course referring to Limits to Growth. They never actually predicted that oil or gas would run out, merely calculated how long current (at that time) reserves of various commodities would last given exponential resource consumption growth and no new reserves being found. of course neither condition held and so here we are. note that oil is not exactly cheap at the moment however, and the forward curve indicates this is not a temporary thing.

Quote:

we might well be in a naturally occuring warming cycle.

well, yes, in as much are we are still coming out of the last ice age, but that is not the proximal cause of the current warming.

the best points per watt is undoubtedly the PS3, but seeing as your computers are going to be on anyway it seems like the least worst option.

Jaganath, thanks to the reference to Limits to Growth. I was not exposed directly to that, but heard second or third hand from teachers that probably did get information directly from that, and by the time that it was presented to us in school, it had indeed been transformed into a sky is falling sort of prediction. It is interesting to be able to look back and see where some of that came from, so as I said, thanks for that reference.

Yes, there are long term heating/cooling cycles such as the ice ages, but there are smaller ones as well. I just read a brief mention of some recent modeling of ocean temps for example that was describing that different oceans warm and cool at different rates, and that we are now at a convergence where many are warm at the same time, and that model fits well with historical data, and would suggest that the human impact is much less than some of the higher estimates.

There is not consensus by all top scientists that humans are the major cause of recent warming. That said though, most if not all would acknowledge that we have had some impact, and we do need to behave in a more sustainable way.

PS - Isn't a PS3 about 900 PPD, and about 200 watts? Many in this thread do much better. (Calculations/watt might be in the PS3 favor though.) So, the de-rating of the PS3 contribution might be harming the environment by encouraging lessor contributing hardware to fold.

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